Wednesday, May 31, 2006

AMD takes on Intel with media-center strategy

AMD has just gone 'live' with their media-center chip strategy to take on Inel's Viiv! And PC's running AMD Live will ship in the coming days from HP. AMD's product strategy is aimed at creating a media-center PC that will help people organize, distribute and share their content.

And they are also launching a suite of applications and services meant to assist people in designing and operating digital entertainment systems.

The Live Entertainment Suite will offer a bunch of interesting features. One, called AMD Live On Demand, is designed to offer a service, via Orb Networks, to stream live or prerecorded television shows, photos, music and movies to devices connected to the Internet. The suite will also include an application tool that aims to compress recorded TV shows, allowing more shows to be stored on a PC. It will also offer 25GB of free storage via AMD's Live Media Vault and a service to set up and manage a home network.

AMD is planning to expand its Live product line later in the year with the capability to show Internet content on a user's television screen - which is the way to go, cos people want TV's in their living rooms and not PC's whatever Microsoft say.

And talking of Microsoft - how do they feel about AMD's 'Live' branding which clearly clashes with their software as services play similarly named 'Live'.